Aesthetics in Journalism--and History

My wife came into my office just now to complain that I'd ruined
the rest of her planned reading by encouraging her to pick up Ryszard
Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun. After she finished,
nothing else matched up. Kapuscinski, as you may know but I did not
until an ex-student recommended the spoiler in question, was a Polish
journalist who died in 2007. I've read many books about Africa, but in
nonfiction not even Joseph Lelyveld's Move Your Shadow, Basil
Davidson's Africa in History, or Adam Hochschild's King
Leopold's Ghost is as powerful as Kapuscinski's casual-looking
essay/reportage collection, which begins with Ghanaian independence in
1957 and ends sometime in the late '90s. Kapuscinski was clearly a
swashbuckler, and I never altogether trusted his many cultural
generalizations or his grim worldview. But his Communist background
clarified his understanding of colonialism and its European
minions. And I winced at the way one of his best chapters connects the
vanity of francophonie, as the French call their ongoing campaign to
maintain their language's international hegemony, to the genocide in
Rwanda. On my only visit to Africa, to attend a performing arts
conference in Cote d'Ivoire in 1995, a year after the worst Rwandan
slaughter began, I wrote about francophonie too, including two deaths
connected to the conference. But never did I suggest how much more
murderous it could be, because I didn't know.

Wanting to post, though, I thought I should glance at Kapuscinki's
Wikipedia page. And when I did I realized I was probably out of my
depth. Some Wikipedia links are useless, but John Ryle's long attack
on The Shadow of the Sun from TLS is something else: a
scrupulous, untendentious, scholarly survey of Kapuscinski's factual
errors, wild exaggerations, and unsupported allegations. As I said, I
had detected braggadocio and bias in this book I admired (and still do
admire). And in fact I was relieved to learn, for instance, that his
claim that there's not a single bookstore in Addis Ababa is simply
untrue. I didn't want Africa to be as bleak as Kapuscinski suggested,
and I didn't really believe it was. Nevertheless, some of Ryle's
evidence makes Kapuscinski look more self-serving anyone should be
comfortable with. And then I Wiki-linked to Geoff Dyer's
Guardian rave and felt my sympathies shifting again. I don't
like Dyer's jazz book But Beautiful for much the same reason
Ryle doesn't like The Shadow of the Sun. I believe its flights
of imagination are self-aggrandizing, making too much of Dyer and not
enough of the musicians they supposedly celebrate--and in the process
condescending to those musicians. But writing straight criticism he
does a good job of defending a method he and Kapuscinski share.

Which allows me to proceed to the small point I was originally
planning to raise. In one of the many great scenes in The Shadow of
the Sun, a Spanish travel writer arrives at Kapuscinski's
guest-house in Bamako and circulates around the somnolent street
chatting with locals who, as usual in this book, are barely sentient
in the scorching sun. Then he blows a whistle and the neighborhood
comes alive. "In a matter of seconds" everyone is dancing as a few
children and then many adults beat out rhythms on tin cans and their
own bodies. This isn't just a party, Kapuscinski says: "this was
something different, something bigger, something loftier and more
important." Suddenly these "idle and superfluous" survivors are
"determined," "decisive," "able to express themselves." The Spaniard
takes a lot of photographs and then the episode is over. He thanks the
participants--no money seems to change hands--and they converse for a
while before dispersing back to their hovels.

Although to his credit Kapuscinski's tone is admiring and
respectful, this scene could obviously be understood to throw a rather
cynical light on the cliche of an Africa imbued with music. But it
could just as easily be understood to exemplify the organizing
function of African music. Certainly it's striking that in the four
excellent books mentioned in the first paragraph, this is the only
extended reference to music I found; even Davidson's cultural history
The African Genius barely mentions music, and that in passing
(insofar as I can tell from skimming the half I never got around to
finishing for precisely that reason). Since most of my nonfiction
reading about Africa has naturally focused on music, and since
whatever African visual artists taught Picasso and Modigliani I feel
quite certain that it's in music that Africa made itself felt most
powerfully in world culture (although not economics), this is a major
omission. How can any historian pretend to describe any African
society or culture without pondering this art form?

The relevance of this post to arts journalism? Gosh, I dunno. Ask
your managing editor if he or she has any ideas.

1 Comment

By Chris Hurst on September 3, 2010 7:31 AM

At some point, Kapuscinski's work was tagged with the term "magic
journalism," and there was always the nagging worry that there was
more "magic" than "journalism" in it. Kapuscinski gave that a
backhanded acknowledgement in his last book by describing how he was
inspired by Herodotus, both the father of historians and the father of
playing fast and loose with the facts.

Kapuscinski is one of my favorite writers, but I'm not a journalist
or a historian. I think of him as a writer like Sebald or Chatwin or
Geoff Dyer (a good writer apart from lousy "But Beautiful"), a writer
who should be enjoyed but not taken at face value. Fiction, in other
words. If I was a journalist, having fiction described as journalism
would bother me.